March is National Social Work Month, a time to celebrate how much our nation’s almost 700,000 social workers do to empower, strengthen, and heal millions of people in our society.  This year’s theme is ‘Elevate Social Work’, and so this is a great opportunity to learn about how much heavy lifting social workers do.  IU East’s Social Work program, in particular, has been on the forefront of this outreach, graduating many IU East students who stay local and benefit our community.

While many resources are online – such as the National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics, first drafted in 1960 and a model for many other organizations who serve vulnerable people – the library offers a wealth of scholarly material for anyone interested in pursuing or appreciating social work.  Several databases, including SocIndex and ProQuest Social Science Journals, index hundreds of academic journals, providing access to millions of dependable articles.  Others, like Social Theory, are more exploratory, showcasing the work of major theorists and delving into the complexities of the field.  Our book collection is strong, too, featuring titles like Reflecting on Social Work – Discipline and Profession: Contemporary Social Work Studies by Karen Lyons, Community Practice: Theories and Skills for Social Workers by David A. Hardcastle, and Lifting Our Voices: The Journeys Into Family Caregiving of Professional Social Workers by Joyce Beckett.

We offer more specialized databases, as well.  The Counseling and Therapy in Video collection (a subset of our AVON database) offers informational and training videos that help give budding social workers a first-hand taste of the issues they’ll face, the clients they’ll work with, and the techniques available to them.  If you would like to see therapeutic approaches such as role play, group counseling, or relaxation strategies in action, this database is perfect for you.

Of course, we also offer one of the core resources for social workers, the Encyclopedia of Social Work, both online and in print.  Constantly updated, this extensive encyclopedia and its bibliographies is vital to research.  In the online version, the more than 400 individual articles can be saved as PDFs.

If you’re interested in finding more, all our social work and social science databases can be found here.  And if you need help, you can ask us at iueref@iue.edu!